Figure 4 Reproduced with permission of Lydia Goehr.

ACD, In Memoriam

       Jonathan Gilmore

      There are many current accounts of Arthur Danto’s intellectual itinerary and his celebrated place within the worlds of art criticism and philosophy. I wish to offer a sense, partial of course, of what he was like to those who knew him closely. When his friend and former colleague Richard Wollheim died, Danto told me of his vexation that, in his substantial autobiography Germs, Wollheim described only his personal development, largely within psychoanalytical parameters. But Danto wanted to know how Wollheim the philosopher, not Wollheim the man, came into being. Danto might have taken comfort in knowing that to distinguish these two dimensions in himself might not have been possible. Who he was as a philosopher was hardly distinguishable from who he was as a person.

      His philosophical fame came from analyzing the transformation instantiated in works of art – those of Pop and Fluxus, the music of Cage, and the dance of Cunningham – that took as its substance everyday objects, sounds, actions, and the like. That began as early as 1964 in his essay “The Artworld,” in which he quaintly referred to a certain “Mr. Andy Warhol,” a figure whom few among his philosophical audience would have heard of or, had they heard of, would have taken seriously. With that essay, and the philosophical and critical writing that followed, Danto initiated a revolution in the theoretical reflection on the arts, a revolution in which philosophers once again began to ask the truly grand questions about art – about its essence and its history – themes that were foresworn by an earlier generation of philosophers allergic to metaphysical speculation and wary of attributing any great cognitive significance to “mere” aesthetic forms. His range and concreteness of examples gave vividness to his discussions – a kind of flesh to spirit – not often found in the anemic Anglo-American tradition in aesthetics. But, more significantly, in grounding his thought in the history of art and its contemporary manifestations, he gave aesthetics a demonstration of the philosophical payoff that the philosophy of science came to enjoy after it recognized that expert knowledge of the sciences and their histories serves not just as coloration in developing idealized models, but in analyzing the very concepts – say, that of species – that are central to philosophical theories.

Danto’s major systematic work of aesthetics was the Transfiguration of the Commonplace, a title he borrowed from one appended to a non-existent book mentioned in a real book by Muriel Spark. But it might as well have been the name of a commonplace book in which he inscribed his principles for how to respond to others. For anyone who had Arthur as a teacher learned that his default approach was to excavate what might be even a minor part of one’s work if it had some value or depth, and show how that was what the work as a whole was really about – transforming lead into gold, or at least a richer metal than what one started with. Responding to a paper I once wrote for him, he said that the first twenty-four pages amounted to no more than superficial philosophy of science, but after that, it was the best philosophy of art he had read in a long time. The paper was only twenty-nine pages! And anyone who went from being his student or admirer to his friend, as I did, learned that this is how he treated people as well – finding whatever was good in them, however implicit or accidental, and deciding that it was that which defined who they really were. This would remain a purely external redefinition if it weren’t that one wanted, when in Danto’s company, to be one’s best self, and sometimes found that one could.

      But the ordinary things, of which he described the transfiguration into indiscernible artistic counterparts, were meaningful to Danto in their own right, and not, as to ironists, only as a form of slumming. In responding to my primitive Italian with his “soldier’s Italian” and an account of the trouble it caused him in polite society, he described with real passion how, when serving in Italy in the Second World War, he would avidly await each installment of a British comic strip about a young intelligence officer named Jane whose misadventures inexplicably but reliably left her partially disrobed (this was the 1940s). After I sent him a book with reproductions from the series, he described the reverie he was sent into while reading it, now more than a half a century later. But that sort of thing was never just one thing for Danto, the way it might be for someone who thought cultural ephemera couldn’t sustain any substantial reflection. We once shared a long train ride and discussed watching the nightly reruns of Seinfeld. I thought, at least in this art form, I’m as much of an expert as him – until, after a long pause in which he adopted a characteristic inward focus, he turned to me and said, “You know, it really is the closest thing our age has to the commedia dell’arte tradition.”

      It was sometimes said of Danto, with admiration or consternation, that he saw the world as it should and could be, not as it was. It would imply too volunteerist a perspective to say that he chose to adopt this perspective, but he certainly recognized having it, blaming it on being been born on January 1st, in which, he said, “Each year opens on a new page, for me as well as for the world.” In truth, Danto’s way of seeing the world was as essential a feature of his identity as any other might be. He suffered, and he suffered with you, and his optimism was not held blithely. Instead, it represented in some ways a moral stand, one no doubt a source of frustration to those who wanted him to share in their cynicism, however, warranted that might be in academic locales. For me, and I’m sure for many others around him, his attitude, his exemplary being, was a source of strength: a goad to think, when possible, beyond what was currently a source of pain; and not to curse the world even if one was right to curse one small part of it. And his cosmopolitanism and earthiness, and his profundity as a philosopher, made that stance credible, when it might have seemed an artificial conceit in others. Although he engaged in the ruthless disputation required of professional philosophers, where expressing too much agreement with another’s argument is a form of discourtesy, Danto was contemptuous of the academic déformation professionnelle of taking pleasure in snide and cavalier criticism. False